The present invention relates generally to the field of social networks, and more particularly to understanding relationships within a social network.
Social networks are often made up of various source websites or applications, such as both public and private connections websites. A given user's contacts in that user's social network are not necessarily well known to the user and/or involved in frequent communication with the user. Some contacts are added to the user's social network based only on brief casual encounters, such as attending a social gathering or a group chat session. Some relationships with social network contacts have become distant after long periods of little communication activity. Oftentimes, users from a common corporate directory don't even know each other before becoming social media website contacts and/or before communicating with each other with an instant message.
Instant messaging (IM), also known as a chat session, as a form of communication over the internet, is commonly used in social network sites and as enterprise communication tools. The basic function of instant messaging is to instantly transfer text-based messages back and forth between two chat participants at least substantially in real time. Multimedia messaging (MMS) is now commonly supported in most commercial IM tools. During a group chat session: (i) participants may invite other people to join the chat who are not familiar with the other chat participants; (ii) participants often mention people outside of the user's social network; and/or (iii) participants introduce topics and/or terms which are only understood by a subset of the chat participants.
In conventional chat systems, a chat participant often needs to lookup participant, technology, and subject matter expert (SME) information including: (i) details about chat participants who are barely known; (ii) details about the chat participants that cannot be recalled; and/or (iii) details about the people (such as SMEs) who are related to the topics and/or terms. The chat participant may currently obtain this information by using currently conventional tools and/or techniques including the following: (i) searching online; (ii) searching her contact history; (iii) finding someone's full profile in an enterprise organizational database; (iv) finding the topic-related emails, then identifying the related people in email archives with full text search; (v) finding someone's publications online; and/or (vi) finding someone's connections list in his LinkedIn profile. (Note: the term “LINKEDIN” may be subject to trademark rights in various jurisdictions throughout the world and are used here only in reference to the products or services properly denominated by the marks to the extent that such trademark rights may exist.)